Wednesday, October 30, 2013

COMMENT: So Long, Saakashvili. The Presidency That Lived By Spin -- And Died By It. By Thomas de Waal (foreignaffairs.com)

Georgian President
Mikheil Saakashvili, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and
Philip Gordon, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian
Affairs, stop in front of a ferris wheel as they walk through the
streets of Batumi, June 5, 2012. (Saul Loeb / Courtesy Reuters)

(foreignaffairs.com) Georgia's reputation for charm has long
preceded it. Travelling in the Soviet Union in 1947, the writer John
Steinbeck heard Russians repeatedly evoke the “magical name of Georgia.”
“They spoke of Georgians as supermen, as great drinkers, great dancers,
great musicians, great workers and lovers,” Steinbeck wrote at the
time.It was the singular achievement of Mikheil “Misha” Saakashvili,
elected Georgia's president in 2004, to have elevated his country's
capacity for charm into the centerpiece of a grand strategy, one
designed to secure power in Georgia by winning over the West in general
and the White House of George W. Bush in particular. As was inevitable,
the strategy eventually failed. Only a year ago, Saakashvili fully
expected that he would win parliamentary elections and that his team
would stay in power almost indefinitely. But defeat in the October 2013
parliamentary vote and a spate of revelations since then about abuses
committed by his government have sent his popularity into a tailspin. A
poll commissioned last month found that 57 percent of Georgians dislike
Saakashvili; only 15 percent of the country approves of his job
performance. After dominating Georgia for nine years, Saakashvili has
still been head of state for the past twelve months, but in practical
terms he has been virtually irrelevant.But for Saakashvili, it always seemed that the pursuit of Western
celebrity was just as important as maintaining popularity at home. In
some sense, the bigger question is not why this pursuit failed but why
it lasted as long as it did. And that is a question only Saakashvili's
enablers in the West can answer.PR STRATEGIST IN CHIEFIf it is hard to disentangle myth from reality in assessing
Saakashvili's political legacy, that is because he intentionally blurred
the lines between Georgia’s political reality and his own PR efforts.
Much of Saakashvili’s presidency was a rebranding exercise along the
lines of Tony Blair's “Cool Britannia” campaign in the 1990s.The popular Rose Revolution, which Saakashvili led in November 2003,
was real enough. It swept the regime of his former patron Eduard
Shevardnadze from power. Two months later, Saakashvili became the
youngest head of state in Europe, and he appointed one of the youngest
governments, eager to try a series of state-building reforms.But thereafter, Saakashvili himself was only intermittently involved
in the day-to-day business of government. His chief responsibility was
to serve two roles: ideas man and chief salesman for his reforms.
Saakashvili accepted the role with enthusiasm, tirelessly promoting the
idea that, thanks to the Rose Revolution, Georgia had undergone a
“mental revolution,” that Georgians had managed to transcend their
history and join the West in one sweeping political and psychological
transformation.

Needless to say, this message was appealing to many
Westerners, especially to political and media elites who were hungry for
what might be described as an “anti-Russia,” a post-Soviet success
story. (And Vladimir Putin duly did his part in helping promote the
message by vigorously opposing it.) Saakashvili gave generous access to
Western media, and in particular to publications such as the Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal,
which they repaid by giving lavish attention to his government's
economic reforms. Saakashvili may be the only person to have twice been
the subject of the “Lunch with the FT” column.Saakashvili's most fateful courtship, however, was not with the media
but with a fellow head of state: George W. Bush. When Saakashvili came
to Washington in February 2004, he did everything to ensure that it
would be love at first sight. Visiting the White House, he told an
enthusiastic audience in his rapid fluent English that, as a former
George Washington University student, this was a “most special
homecoming.” An hour before his first Oval Office meeting with Bush,
Saakashvili is said to have been hastily studying the State of the Union
speech that Bush had delivered a month earlier. When Saakashvili, in
his private meeting with the president, repeated verbatim some of the
phrases about freedom and democracy from that speech, Bush and his team
listened in rapture. Starting at that moment, it seems, Bush concluded
that Saakashvili was “our guy.” In public comments afterward, Bush told
Saakashvili, “I'm proud to call you friend.”Saakashvili perfectly fit Bush's preferred image of a transformative
leader: he was young, fluent in English, familiar with the vocabulary of
reform and democracy, and, not least, ready to back U.S. foreign policy
goals in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were also impressed by his
commitment to nation-building in Georgia itself. The first years of
Saakashvili’s presidency were a great success story. In short order, he
eliminated most of the country's Soviet-era bureaucracy, ushering in a
new policy force, traffic police, and tax and municipal authorities.
Low-level bribe-taking was stamped out. Everything from the school
system to the look of the national flag was overhauled.But the Americans seemed to be unbothered by the fact that
Saakashvili's style of leadership was much more authoritarian than his
liberal rhetoric. His government's modernization efforts were imposed
top-down, with increasing brutality and disregard for large parts of the
population. Saakashvili's interior minister, Vano Merabishvili, served
as the president's enforcer-in-chief. Merabishvili rightly earned praise
for a crackdown on Georgia's powerful organized-crime lords. But the
machine he built turned Georgia into a police state. Heavy surveillance
became routine. The law enforcement agencies’ net was cast so wide that
Georgia’s prison population per capita became the largest in Europe --
and those statistics concealed thousands of people living in limbo due
to a corrupt plea bargaining system that threatened to result in their
imprisonment at any moment, even absent a trial. Inside the country's
prisons, the government practiced institutionalized torture, including
the rape of inmates by prison guards.ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONTBy 2007, Georgia had a large constituency that felt marginalized or
left out of the Saakashvili project. Western European governments had
also become more skeptical. But most of Saakashvili’s supporters in the
United States, as well as those in central and eastern Europe, stayed
loyal.American support served to insulate him from some of the domestic
criticism -- but eventually it proved to be his undoing. Although
Americans and Georgians had adopted the habit of using the word “ally”
to refer to each other, there was never a formal alliance between the
two countries. Saakashvili allowed his judgment to be skewed by his
glowing testimonials from the Bush White House.Saakashvili's miscalculations were tragically exposed in August 2008,
when war broke out with Russia over Georgia's breakaway province of
South Ossetia. We now know that the war was triggered by Saakashvili's
decision to attack the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali in a doomed
attempt to reconquer the province by force, only to provoke a massive --
and well-prepared -- Russian assault on his country. Saakashvili
probably believed that if he captured Tskhinvali, the United States
would back him against Russia. In an interview with the BBC about the
war, he tried to explain his reasoning: “Hopefully the international
community would wake up and see -- we concentrate efforts, we get some
kind of reversal.” We have yet to learn whether this was a blind guess
or based on private assurances from supporters in Washington. Certainly,
senior officials told him not to try the military option. Back in 2005,
Bush himself had told Saakashvili that if he went to war with Russia,
“the U.S. cavalry isn't coming over the horizon.” And once the war was
underway, the United States duly did nothing to intervene.The war also exposed the limitations of personal charm and
brilliance. Foreign interlocutors said that they were both thrilled and
exhausted by Saakashvili’s tendency to launch into monologues. One
Western interlocutor said, “After you’ve had a discussion with him, you
need to lie down. You need a drink.” Observers noticed that
Saakashvili’s decision-making procedures were haphazard, and that he was
negligent about maintaining a record of his government’s deliberations.
Indeed, most of the government's decisions were made by a small group
of advisers -- most of whom were younger than Saakashvili himself, who
was only 41 in 2008 -- in meetings held after midnight (which,
incidentally, meant that the Georgian government worked more or less on
Washington time). Saakashvili’s informal system could not cope with the
strain. Among the reasons that the Georgian military is said to have
been unable to hold its lines was that it was receiving orders via cell
phone, rather than via any standardized chain of command. After only
five days, Georgia inevitably accepted its humiliating defeat by the
Russians.Saakashvili’s impulsive, abrasive style won him passionate admirers,
but also a long list of enemies, ranging from many of his former
ministers to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Sometime after 2008, an important addition to this list was Georgia’s
richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili. Thanks to indignation against the
Russians’ bullying tactics, Saakashvili rode out the storm of the August
war. But discontent was growing, and Georgians eventually rallied
around Ivanishvili, who had earlier supported Saakashvili’s government
and funded many of its projects but had, for reasons not yet fully
apparent, angrily broken with him.The last two years in Georgia have been dominated by a grudge match
between the two men. Saakashvili first tried to do everything in his
power to destroy Ivanishvili by attempting to withhold his Georgian
passport, strip him of his assets, and stop his media outlets from
broadcasting. Since he won the election in October 2012, Ivanishvili has
done his best to destroy Saakashvili, trying to defund his presidential
apparatus and having a number of his allies arrested.GEORGIA ON THE MINDIt is to Saakashvili’s credit that, although he is no democrat, he
was sufficiently conscious of his legacy to allow Georgians to
experience the political change they so clearly wanted. Over the past
year, Georgia has become, for want of a better word, more Georgian. It
is simultaneously more democratic, more open, more nationalistic, and
more Christian Orthodox. It now looks as though Saakashvili’s “mental
revolution” was mostly a mirage. His much-touted de-Stalinization
campaign was a case in point: its defining act was the removal of the
huge statue of Stalin from the dictator’s hometown of Gori, but it was
done without any public discussion, and masked the unfortunate reality
that Georgians respect the memory of Stalin. (A poll, commissioned by
the Carnegie Endowment last October, revealed that 45 percent of
Georgians still had positive feelings about the dictator.) Now the
people of Gori want to put the Stalin statue back up again.In practical terms, the results for the new government have so far
been mixed. It has made progress in tackling some of the problems
Saakashvili left behind. The judiciary is being strengthened to make it
free of political control. The media is far more diverse. Parliament is
lively and no longer a rubber stamp for the president’s fiats. The
government has facilitated much greater movement across the border with
Abkhazia and has reached out to South Ossetia. But the new government
lacks some of the competence of its iron-fisted predecessor. Growth
rates have slowed, and Georgia’s biggest socio-economic problems,
unemployment and rural poverty, have stayed at the same levels, despite
Ivanishvili’s promises. Some policy changes, however long overdue, have
also created new problems. A much-needed prison amnesty, which reduced
Georgia’s prison population to more civilized levels, has also pushed up
the crime rate. Worryingly, there have also been a number
of nasty episodes of bigotry and violence against national and sexual
minorities, who felt more protected by the pro-Western Saakashvili.This week, Georgia acquired a new president with fewer constitutional
powers, the former university rector Giorgi Margvelashvili. Ivanishvili
is also about to step down as prime minister. As a result, Georgia will
soon have two leaders, a president and a prime minister, who have
almost no name recognition outside the country. But it is still unclear
what will become of Saakashvili himself. The main issue now is whether
he will be prosecuted upon stepping down as president. That question
obviously depends on whether the prosecutor’s office can put forward
evidence that is seriously incriminating. But fundamentally, the
question is political. Ominously, Saakashvili’s enforcer, Vano
Merabishvili, is now in detention facing criminal charges for his
actions while an officer. There is a loud constituency in Georgia that
would support the arrest of Saakashvili as well. That view may be shared
by many in the government, including, perhaps, Ivanishvili himself.They should be fully aware, however, that the arrest of Saakashvili
would blacken Georgia’s reputation abroad. Many Georgians have cooled on
Saakashvili’s charm, but it did earn him friends in countries with whom
Georgia's new government will need to maintain good relations. Like it
or not, Saakashvili’s successors will have to live with the fact that
Saakashvili's renown will still outstrip their own, at least for the
foreseeable future. Given all that, their wisest course would probably
be to quietly appreciate the irony that Saakashvili's pursuit of foreign
fame was likely both the source of his undoing and his final saving
grace.

FRONTLINE CLUB GEORGIA

Frontline Georgia is a media club that aims to serve as a politically-neutral venue for journalists, public officials, students, intellectuals come together in a dialogue over media, social, political and cultural issues important for Georgia and the region. Frontline Georgia holds panel discussions, screenings, exhibitions, conferences and master classes.

Frontline Georgia’s mission is to contribute to quality journalism and exchange of views. Its Events Program will bring together the key players and thinkers in politics and the media and give a member an opportunity not only to hear from experts but to ask questions and contribute to the discussion in a relaxed and informal atmosphere.

While there are other meeting places for important public discussions, Frontline Georgia is among the very few, where people from different ideological and political camps meet together. This neutrality has been one of the biggest achievements of the club, which operates in Georgia’s highly politicized and polarized social and media environment.

Ruth Olshan in her film portrays musicians who work with different approaches: a male choir searching and cultivating old folk songs in the Caucasus region, a female choir, a school dance company and musicians who enhance Georgian folk music. There is a common denominator that links the diverse protagonists in Olshan’s film: Singing, dancing and music are crucial elements of their lifestyle. Music is as important as “air to breath,” explains the director of the female choir . The subtle camera work discreetly catches moments and spontaneous encounters, showing that the rehearsals and the singing brings moments to these women where they are taken away from their normal course of life. For life in Rustavi, a small town near Tiflis, seems bleak. The industry is dead, the unemployment rate is enormous. You ask yourself how people can live. The choir women’s beauty and positive energy exude an affirmative sign of life, even in mournful moments. Men and women sing and dance both joy and sorrow off their chest. In Georgia, music seems to be omnipresent, almost existential. Even if a young singer does not think folk music is “sexy”, he still gets hooked. It gets under his skin. The film pays tribute to this fascination, vitality, and spiritedness.

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